Traveller: Action-Packed Amnesia

So, first Traveller session was yesterday, and it seemed to be reasonably successful. A lot of it consisted of the initial logistical arrangements of the party’s trading enterprise, but I decided to spice up the process by throwing in a little bit of chaos.

One of the players is – provided their OOC plans go as expected – not necessarily going to be in London for very long, so I knew that any mysteries or plot hooks in their background would need to be addressed quickly – preferably in this first block of sessions – because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to tackle them with that player present, which would be disappointing for everyone. The biggest mystery in his background consists of the last four years of his service in the Scouts, in which we’d determined in character generation that there was a certain amount of missing time. So, I decided to make the PC’s amnesia crisis a little more immediate: the PC in question woke up at the start of the session with no memory of the past four years or so, and voices in their head to boot. By the end of the session the mystery was resolved: the PC in question had been replaced by an android with false memories, as part of a convoluted assassination attempt, and the session closed with the android being destroyed and the real PC waking up.

It’s always risky messing with player free will like this, but in this case I think it worked reasonably well. It helped that we’d established that this character did have a fat chunk of amnesia in the character gen session last week, so we all knew a certain amount of mindfuckery might be on the cards. I also think it helped that it was only for one session and I wasn’t expecting the player to run the mind-controlled android for the long haul – it also helped that the android’s actions would, by definition, not reflect that much on the real PC. It also means the next session is going to put the real PC at centre stage, which I think is both fair compensation and a good opportunity to get at least one session in focused on this specific character before the player departs, and nicely it means that the amnesia issue can be resolved nice and quickly. (Basically, the “amnesia” consists of those sections of the PC’s memories the bad guys weren’t able to copy-paste into the android, so next session the player’s going to get a revised personal history with the real story.) There’s going to be sufficient knock-on effects from what’s happened here to make sure that the plotline in question isn’t just rushed through and then forgotten, but at the same time the first block of sessions should hopefully sufficiently self contained that if and when the player in question becomes available they can feel that they’ve still been able to play through the interesting part of their character’s story. (Of course, I wouldn’t try this sort of trick with every group; however, in the previous block of sessions we’d been playing through the opening movements of Tatters of the King, so I was able to guage the group’s tolerance for note-passing and general weirdness affecting PCs there.)

Lessons learned:

You can get away with borrowing player control of their PC, provided you make it obvious that it’s a temporary situation only.

It’s even easier to get away with it if it’s less a matter of you taking control of their PC and more a matter of allowing them to control a non-player character who happens to be borrowing the PC’s memories.